reading blogroll

out of date goodies

In order to help the large amount of people looking for my old widgets everyday, I'm putting below a list of the most wanted. Note that the others are still accessible at http://zendold.lojcomm.com.br/.

Entry

There are times in the life when you realise that the world has really changed and the things that was once so important to you doesn’t matter anymore. This is the case of my old dithered-extended quirksmode javascript library. It cost me years to enhance and extend but nothing more makes sense in a better standardized world.

A brief about the Internet history

There is a dark time in the Internet history well known among the old developers called Browser Wars. It’s the time when the Internet Explorer and the Netscape Navigator were struggling theirselves for the dominance in the web browser marketplace.

At this era, in the late 90’s, the leaders Netscape Navigator (72% of the marketshare) and Internet Explorer (18%) were often focusing in features over bug fixes, therefore this is a time of unstable browsers, shaky web standards compliance, frequent crashes, security holes and lots of user headaches.

Developers challenge at 90’s

As you can imagine, all those over-specs proprietary features poping-up in a hallucinated speed and the very loose standards compliance created an extreme-ultra-high-hostil environment for developers, specially the brand-new DHTML ones in the early and later version 4 browsers (Javascript 1.2 and 1.3 respectively). Which had to spend hours learning a “different” javascript specification for each Browser they want to support. Who of this era doesn’t remember of the evil pair document.all and document.layers ?

During that time it was common for web designers to display “best viewed in Netscape” or “best viewed in Internet Explorer” logos with 800 × 600 and link these images to a source from which the “preferred” browser could be downloaded.

Yet, although all those incompatibilities some brave guys did a really exceptional work. The first name I remember when I think about this era is our eternal HTML Guru – Jeff Rouyer who created some fantastic introduction to DHTML with his “Curious Eye” site and the “Dynamic HTML Web Magic” book. Another name I think must be cited is Dithered – Christopher who created the 1k DHTMLAPI and many other goodies which helped developers like me in the hard time. Last but not less important is the Quirksmode – Peter-Paul Koch who wrote a lot and still writes a lot of tips for real javascript developers, specially in the quirksmode era, like use “object detection instead of browser detection”, using the defer script tag attribute when you know that the browser does not need to wait for the entire script to be parsed and evaluated and other useful things.

1k DHTMLAPI – The base library

The 1k DHTMLAPI is a fully-functional, cross-browser DHTMLAPI that weighs in at about 1k. The script provides functions that set an element’s visibility, z-index, x and y coordinates, width and height, and clipping. I’ve also thrown in one that can write new HTML content into the element. The script supports NS4+, IE4+, Mozilla, Opera 4+ and any other browsers that support either W3C standards, the IE DOM, or the NS4.x DOM. – from dithered

Personal extensions

These are my own pieces of code, they follow the original code naming rules. I know that you will find some really strange things there but as I said before, they are fruit of a lot of study, experience and love XD

Old library in use

As an example of what i’ve accomplished with this loved library, here a pretty power site coded in the end of 2003 start of 2004. Note that XMLHttpRequest was not available yet and the page makes an interesting approach to the “ASync” loading problem.

Time for the new

Well, I’ve spent too much time talking about the oldies but the main reason of this entry is to archive a main decision in my development behavior. It’s not new to anyone that I’m using mootools since early 2007, I’ve even worked in some widgets and some core optimizations that year. Mootools is the javascript framework of my choice for a lot of reasons the main ones are: